Micro chipped fish feed data appetites of river users

Sunday 6 Aug 2017

Fish scientists at Charles Sturt University (CSU) are
working with partners to make public a huge database of information on native
fish living in rivers across southern Australia.

"Over the past 10 years, scientists have tagged over 75 000
fish using microchips, the same technology used to identify pet cats and dogs,
to help study fish migration up and down rivers in the southern Murray Darling
Basin," said Dr Lee Baumgartner, a leading fish ecologist with CSU's Institute for Land,
Water and Society.

"We have strategically-placed listening stations along the
Murray River to study the movements of these fish, many of which are either
endangered or highly prized by anglers.

"The listening stations have been installed into fish
ladders, structures that allow fish to swim past dams and weirs built across
streams.

"Each time a tagged fish passes a listening station, the tag
number, time and location are transmitted to a centralised database known as
FishNet.

"To date, we have over 50 million detections in the FishNet
database. This provides invaluable information on how fish respond to events
such as environmental flows, natural floods, 'blackwater' events and spawning
cues," Dr Baumgartner said.

FishNet is the brain child of Melbourne-based IT firm
KarlTek Pty Ltd.

"Data from tagged fish is contributed by various scientists,
community groups and government agencies to ensure all fish movement data is stored
in one location," said KarlTek managing director, Mr Karl Pomorin.

"The user friendly website is regularly updated and has been
specifically developed with anglers and school children in mind," Mr Pomorin
said.

"However, in line with the Australian
Open Data policy, the project ultimately aims to ensure that data
collected using public money is available to everyone with internet access."

CSU and KarlTek are now looking to improve public access to
this information through a project funded by the Australia National Data
Service (ANDS), a project supported by the Commonwealth government under the
National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy program.

"University students, recreational anglers and water
management agencies place substantial demand for access to FishNet data for various
purposes. We are looking at how we can make this publically funded data more
readily available," Dr Baumgartner said.

A summary of fish detection data from Lock 10 near Wentworth
on the Murray River is available here. Users
can navigate the site to see the proportion of different fish species that have
passed Lock 10 over the past year.

It also includes an interface which demonstrates the total
river kilometres travelled by some of the big 'movers' along the rivers.

"We are regularly seeing fish travelling hundreds or
thousands of kilometres. These fish are really moving up and downstream over
many years," Dr Baumgartner said.

The summarised FishNet data can be seen at http://fish.karltek.com.au. Staff at KarlTek point out that fish movement in the Murray River during winter is minimal, compared with warmer seasons. Therefore, no fish detections have been recorded at Lock 10 in the last month or week. This is expected to change
as warmer spring weather arrives.